I have read many about REST api in php articles. but I still get quite confusing.
they basically rewrite the url to a index.php, which process the url and depends on the method, then send response
but which is the properly way to process the url? this looks doen't look correct...
- get the uri and split it
- I should know what to do with each portion, eg. for GET /usr/1 I should do something like:
if($myUri[0]=="usr")
getUser($myUri[1]);
if the request url is like GET www.domain.com/user/1
it would call getUser($id);
but what happen if you can also retrieve the user by name, or maybe e-mail? so the url can also be www.domain.com/user/john or www.domain.com/user/john@gmail.com
and each url should call different methods like getUsrByName($name) or getUsrByEmail($mail)
The proper way of handling this would be to have URLs like this:
domain.com/user/id/1 -> user::getById
domain.com/user/email/foo@bar.com -> user::getByEmail
domain.com/user/username/foo -> user::getByUsername
However, specifying multiple "parameters" is more like a search, I'd go against using resources for that, because a path should be absolute. Which means:
domain.com/user/name/Kossel/likes/StackOverflow
And:
domain.com/user/likes/StackOverflow/name/Kossel
Are not the same resource. Instead I'd do:
domain.com/user/?name=Kossel&likes=StackOverflow
This is what Stack Overflow uses:
stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php
stackoverflow.com/tags/php/new
stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mysql?sort=featured
To avoid long if/else statement, use variable function names. this allows you to use the url string to call the correct function.
http://php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php
Also, you may want to use classes/class methods instead of functions. this way you can set up an __autoload function, which will allow you to only load code that you are going to use each time the index.php is called.
MVC architecture usually breaks their urls into /class_name/class_method_name/arguments...
